Why DevOps Works

Unless you’re just totally clueless to what is going on in the IT workplace nowadays, you’ve no doubt been hearing about the DevOps role.  Simply put, it’s a methodology and practice of developers and operations staff working together, sometimes in the same team.  The goal is to break down the silos and get people talking, working together and to stop the nonsense of throwing stuff over the wall in both directions.

Of course reading about something is one thing, seeing it in action and working is another.  For the past 5 weeks I’ve been on a DevOps hybrid team – we’ve got developers, change control, DBAs, web admins, monitoring, network and automation (me) folks all together in the same physical space.  The results so far?

• More conversations that have merit instead of endless meetings that drag on forever.  We talk, we debate, we decide.
• Expanded knowledge.  In the past 5 weeks I’ve discovered Puppet, GitHub and JMeter – all thanks to being near to and involved with the development teams.
• No more “we do it this way because…”.  Since we are all together, we don’t accept the old mantra of we’ve always done it this way because nonsense.
• Stuff gets done.  No more waiting around for weeks for something to happen – we have all interested parties in the room who can make things happen.
• We see the big picture.  We are all seeing the big picture now.  We know the goal and the road to get to it.  We are no longer taking 15 different roads trying to get toward the same goal and falling in the ditch.

So that’s the first 5 weeks of what will hopefully be many more.  You can argue all you want for your silos, and how it won’t work in your organization because, and whatever other excuses you want to make.  However, it’s clear to me that it’s working, it’s working well, and this is the future of IT.

As a recent blog entry by Avichal Garg put it, perhaps instead of hiring 10x people, we should instead focus on a 10x team – and that is just what we have done.

#DevOps rules!